Stan Richards

(top) Poster for Lombardo Custom Apparel, 1994. Text reads: When you
make fifty million looking like a million bucks just isn't good enough;
(bottom) Poster for Harley-Davidson Motor Clothes, 1993. Text reads: The
Necktie is Society's Leash

1995 AIGA MEDAL

Hi, this is Tom Bodett for Motel 6. Oh sure, it'll be rough
to survive one night without avocado body balm or French-milled
soap, but maybe the money you save'll help you get over it. It
always works for me.

And this is Stan Richards, 1995 AIGA Medalist. A designer who
says he's most proud of his twangy radio spots for a no-frills
motel chain. Stan is the ad man in the rarefied world of graphic
design, the slick Easterner among the straight-shootin' Texans. He
defies easy characterization. “Just call me a creative guy,” he
says.

People cal him all sort of things. Pentagram partner Woody
Pirtle has called him “the ideal businessman, salesman, teacher,
and mentor.” Rex Peteet of Sible/Peteet has called him “my
cheerleader, my muse, my conscience, my dad, my friend, my critic,
my enemy—all in the same day.” He's been favorably or unfavorably
compared by various Richards Group “alumni”—all now highly
successful entrepreneurs in their own design and advertising
businesses—to Leonardo da Vinci, Midas, Machiavelli, Hemingway,
E.F. Hutton, Michael Jackson and God.

Stan Richards, founder and head of the Dallas-based Richards
Group, is the quintessential advertising agency executive. In fact,
his agency is the only one that's been named “agency of the year”
four times by Adweek magazine. He's also the
quintessential graphic designer, principal of Richards, Brock,
Miller, Mitchell & Associates (RBMM), one of America's premier
design firms, winner of too many major design awards to count. And
as head of various entities that create and produce print
advertising, television commercials, radio spots, film titles,
annual reports, corporate logos, public relations, sales promotion,
and marketing communications of all kinds, he is perhaps above all
the consummate businessman, named “entrepreneur of the year” by
Inc. magazine in 1995. How many entities he runs and how
much money they all make is a bit of a mystery. “A bunch” is all
Stan will say, admitting that he has 315 employees, $300 million in
annual billings, two buildings in the north end of Dallas, and
clients from San Francisco to Yarmouth, Maine.

Stan was born in 1932 in West Oak Lane, Philadelphia, a typical
suburban neighborhood. His father was a bartender and his mother a
hostess at restaurants and social director at hotels. When he was
in high school, the family moved to the New Jersey shore and Stan
played basketball for Atlantic City High, where he “drew better
than anybody else.” “Everybody's mother thinks they can draw better
than the other kids in school,” he says. “My mom thought I could
draw better than anybody else in the whole world.” This
constant familial encouragement, coupled with the “real” feedback
of always being chosen poster contest winner, brought him to the
Philadelphia Museum School and then to Pratt Institute, where he
came under the tutelage of the legendary Hershel Levit, the teacher
who has been credited with being the most significant influence on
the careers of Gene Federico, Steve Frankfurt, Len Sirowitz and
other advertising luminaries who, along with Stan, learned the
ropes at Pratt's Brooklyn campus in the late '40s and '50s. “It was
a terrific program,” recalls Stan. “The best school in the country.
Extraordinarily broad-based. We learned 2-D, 3-D, color theory,
illustration, lettering, how to make great ads, and more important,
how to make good judgments.” Unlike many of his classmates, though,
Stan didn't stay in New York. Inspired by the work of Saul Bass
(“one of my heroes”) and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, he
decided to take off for L.A. after graduation to do the kind of
work for which Doyle Dan Bernback was starting to get famous. For
some reason he decided to stop in Dallas on the way there, and
spotted an opportunity that nobody else could se at the time. “I
was one of better kids out of Pratt,” says Stan, “with a highly
advanced portfolio. Dallas was a cow town. I mean, it was a
retarded advertising community. But I saw that Texas was
going to grow and flourish. Good work was going to be really
difficult to sell. But if I could stick to it, I could become the
predominant designer. It took a lot of years, but we did it.”

It's interesting that he doesn't say, “I did it.” From the
beginning, Stan was a “we” kind of guy, a team builder. The
Richards Group/RBMM may be the only creative organization in the
country that has something akin to an alumni association, having
nurtured the careers of, in addition to Pirtle and Peteet, such
important design firm principals as Jack Summerford, Don Sibley,
Cap Panell, Arthur Eisenberg, Jerry Herring and Mark Perkins. And
then there are the ones who stayed, including Dick Mitchell, Steve
Miller, Ed Brock, Brian Boyd and Kenny Garrison. Some of Stan's
partners and colleagues have been with him for more than twenty
years.

Stan started his Dallas career by taking a job with the Bloom
Agency. “I hated it,” he says. “I hated the politics and the
bureaucracy, but I figured you owed an employer at least a year.”
In 1953 he and his wife, Betty, began selling freelance design
services to agencies that were looking for outstanding creative.
And soon there was a milestone month when they billed $135. They
spent their times looking for the best clients, putting together
the best-run shop in town, finding the best people and getting them
to do their best work. Looking back on those years, Stan says, “I
made a point of seeing every kid who wanted to see me. I hired the
most immensely talented people. I taught them how to run a highly
disciplined organization, and how to run it profitably. I taught
them how to fight very hard for doing things right. It took a
while, but soon we dominated the local awards shows. And then my
competitive instincts ran nationally.”

They still do. Today, Stan crisscrosses the country in his
private jet, moving from client to client, from briefing to
presentation, from mission to accomplished.

Although he may be most proud of his work for Motel 6, he
deserves equal acclaim for—among many other achievements—developing
the theme annual report (over twenty-five years of outstanding
reports for Loman Financial Corporation, which celebrate the
American home and family); for using graphic design to help
transform TGI Fridays from a single restaurant to a $.5 billion,
400-strong chain; for designing the title sequence for Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Saul Bass must have been
pleased); and for orchestrating multifaceted marketing campaigns
that launched and ensured the success of Rouse Company real estate
projects nationwide.

“Why categorize yourself?” he asks rhetorically. “I want my
clients to say, 'I've got a good creative guy.' Some clients who
see me as an advertising guy don't even know I'm a graphic
designer. And don't care. The difference is the business
relationship. Being a designer is a project-based relationship;
you're purely focused on one aspect of the work, the design of it.
In advertising, it's a long-term, overarching business
relationship, which can take place over many, many years. You do
anything and all things to enhance the client's business. It could
be TV, print, radio. I write headlines, theme lines, come up with
ideas for campaigns, do thumbnails.”

A typical workday in the life of Stan Richards finds him up at
five in the morning, taking a four-mile run with “a couple of
buddies,” maybe a CFO type and a young art director. Then it's in
the office by 7:45 a.m. and “endless meetings,” sometimes twenty
meeting a day. Some last a few hours and others take three or four
minutes, if, as Stan puts it, “That's all the time you need to sit
down with top creatives and go over what they've been doing. When
you have good, strong people turning out terrific work, sometimes
all you have to say is, 'That's great, let's go.'” After a morning
of meetings he might be off to a lunch presentation in San Antonio,
then a meeting with a CEO in Orlando, then back to the office
before leaving for home—rarely later than 6:30 p.m. “I've always
been very committed to family,” he says, “real attentive to being
home in the evenings. From the beginning I was not going to be the
kind of person who was not there for dinner.” Stan and Betty have
been married for almost forty years. Grant, their older son, is a
creative director in San Francisco; Brad is a clinical psychologist
at Harvard Medical School.

A typical non-work day in the life of Stan Richards in something
else again. He's into cars, fishing, and music—each in a typically
big, Richards kind of way. In cars, he's “won lots of trophies”
rallying a racing, and thinks he may be better known to more people
in the car world than the ad world. Fishing means chasing blue
marlin around the Gulf of Mexico. And music used to be the way he
earned his living before people in the oil, financial, health care
and real estate businesses in Texas and around the country got wind
of his other talents. In the late '50s he had a live television
show on Dallas's CBS affiliate in which he played the five-string
banjo, sang and interviewed local celebrities. “I played
professionally in bars through school and in the first years when
selling design was a real struggle,” he says.

Although the struggle has long been over and Stan's legacy as
designer and ad man is cast in our profession's equivalent of Mount
Rushmore, perhaps he'll always be thought of foremost in the mentor
role. At the 1992 AIGA National Conference in Chicago, Woody Pirtle
honored Stan with a visual tribute of slides, quotes and
remembrances. “He expected each of us to enjoy the kind of autonomy
that his office thrived on and to do it all,” Pirtle recalled.
“Concept, design, writing, illustrating, handling production, and
finally billing the job. It was as close to running one's own
business as is possible while working for someone else. And in the
end, your success or failure was always judged by the strength of
the central conceptual platform. We quickly learned that if the
concept wasn't there, the rest wasn't worth doing.”

While Stan's clients, such as Jess Hay, CEO of Lomas Financial
Corporation, consistently express appreciation for the positive
effects his work has had on their businesses, a generation of
designers has chosen him to receive the AIGA Medal as a symbol of
their admiration and thanks—even though their feelings about him
may be still sometimes mixed with frustration and even a little
envy.

In tones sounding a bit like Motel 6's laconic Tom Bodett, all
those Richards Group alumni have just about the same thing to say
about him:

“Like my dad, he was tough.”
“Nothing was ever quite good enough.”
“He thought I could have always done it better.”
“But I could have never made it without him.”